Materialists Is a Romantic Comedy That Takes Romance Seriously

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Celine Song's new movie stars Dakota Johnson as a matchmaker caught between two men, played by Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal.

The decline of the romantic comedy began around the era when people began referring to these movies as “rom coms,” a term drawn from the hokey industry slang used in olden times by trade publications. Romantic comedies have always existed almost solely for pleasure’s sake—that’s what’s great about them. But they don’t deserve the degrading slangy shorthand they’ve been slapped with, which feels like marketing terminology that we’ve openly welcomed into our everyday language. Movies are commodities, sure. But also: the romantic comedy might be the most sublime entertainment genre devised by humankind. Why do we insist on sanding down its dignity to a manageable niblet?

In the public spheres where people argue about such things—namely, social media—people who have seen Celine Song’s mournful-delightful Materialists are eager to warn people that despite how the trailer makes the movie look, it’s not a romantic comedy. But maybe it is a romantic comedy—it’s just not a rom-com, the kind of Kate Hudson–Matthew McConaughey laugher-weeper-laugher where the heroine falls off a boat, or breaks the heel of her shoe, or goes through a whole box of tissues to dry her tears after the wrong-guy-whom-she-thinks-is-right dumps her. It’s more subtle than that, spikier, and certainly a lot less hilariously funny. But whether intentionally or not, Song, who wrote and directed the film, seems to be applying the principles of the finest romantic comedies, like those made by Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges. Materialists is more bittersweet than sweet—which is what makes it so wonderful, in a wistful, elusive way.

Johnson and Pascal as Lucy and Harry on a date Courtesy of A24

Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, an ambitious New York matchmaker who listens carefully to what her clients want in a partner and then locates a corresponding human who possesses as many of those qualities as possible. She promises one prospective male client that she can help him meet “high quality women.” Almost all the guys who come to her want a woman who’s fit, though their definition of that is alarmingly restrictive. Nearly all the women want a guy 6 feet or taller; they also, unsurprisingly, want a guy who makes money. Lucy is happy to go shopping for them, and she’s honest—maye a bit too honest—about the transactional nature of finding a mate. “Marriage is a business deal, and it always has been,” she tells a panicky client, a bride-to-be already dressed in her finery, who has gotten cold feet. These people, the women especially, have been more forthright with her about their hopes and desires than they have been with their therapists. One client in particular, Sophie (Zoe Winters), is simply a nice person who’s been rejected by too many of the men Lucy has set her up with. Lucy urges her to stick with the program—she’ll find Sophie a guy.

Meanwhile, we know very little about what Lucy herself wants. After she persuades that reluctant bride to walk down the aisle, she tries to relax and enjoy the wedding. The groom’s best man—lo and behold, it's Pedro Pascal in a tuxedo, playing a self-made millionaire named Harry—strikes up a conversation with her. She sees dollar signs when she looks into his eyes, but not for herself. She thinks he’d make an ace partner for any of her most demanding clients. He’s rich, gorgeous, well-mannered—she calls him a “unicorn.” But he’s interested only in her. Before she can even think to flirt with him, her ex shows up at her table with her go-to beverage order, a beer and a Coke. That ex is Chris Evans in regulation black-pants-and-white-shirt catering gear, playing a character named John; he plunks the drinks in front of her like a challenge. She’s surprised to see him—but despite itself, her face lights up like a carnival Ferris wheel. They agree to meet after the wedding, where they have a serious discussion in his beater of a car—who keeps a car in New York? she still wants to know—about why they broke up in the first place. As they talk, the traffic around them magically hushes, and Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arm Around a Memory" wafts from the car stereo. By definition, the past is a thing you can't hang onto, but these two insist on trying.

Then Harry begins seriously wooing Lucy, who wants many of the same things her clients do, though she’s reluctant to admit it. He takes her to dinner at nice places, instead of just sauntering back from the halal truck with a crinkly bag of rice-and-stuff. Meanwhile, John, chronically underemployed as an actor, keeps resurfacing. What does Lucy really want? She doesn’t even dare ask that question. But Harry’s apartment—one of those anonymous high-rise spaces that people with taste supposedly want, even though they practically scream “no taste”—sure is nice. And John still lives in some deeply unfashionable far-flung New York neighborhood, with roommates. There’s no contest between these guys.

Except there is. Materialists isn’t laugh-out-loud funny. Even so, some of Lucy’s pronouncements are so truly awful that a blunt snort of laughter is the only response. Song wrote plays for years before making her debut film, 2023’s Past Lives, a gorgeous, tender picture about a Korean-Canadian immigrant in New York (played, marvelously, by Greta Lee) who’s shaken when her childhood crush reemerges in her life. Materialists is markedly different in mood and tone. But like Past Lives, it’s all about the things we don’t dare to want. How do we ever know we’re making the right choice? Song seems to want to reassure us that we don’t. Certainty is a game for fools.

Song was inspired to write Materialists after working herself, for a time, as a matchmaker. If you have to categorize it, Materialists is closer to what Stanley Cavell called the comedy of remarriage, movies in which people who are already married separate, ostensibly on their way to divorce, and flirt with other partners before returning to the person who is, for them, home. But unlike Materialists, those movies—pictures like Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth or Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story—emerged in a time when Hollywood censors were keeping a close eye on movies’ ideology, determined to protect audiences from unwholesome influences. The comedy of remarriage created a safe place for fantasy out-of-wedlock flirtations, because, in the end, the genre reaffirmed that sticking with the partner you originally chose is your best bet after all.

Johnson and Evans as Lucy and John Courtesy of A24

Materialists riffs on the same idea, but for other reasons. The comedy of remarriage rose in popularity at a time when people—especially women—suddenly had more autonomy, relatively speaking, and didn’t necessarily have to succumb to arranged marriages, or marry as a way of uniting family fortunes. With Materialists, Song shows us how far, and yet not-so-far, we’ve come. Women aren’t just encouraged to work, we’re expected to—yet our salaries are statistically still far lower than those of men. We may pretend not to want or really need all that much money, but even a cursory peek at Instagram reveals ostensibly ordinary women doing their daily stuff, only they’re wearing the $600 sweatpants outfit, not the Old Navy one, and burbling about how they just bought their first Birkin (new). What’s up with that? Often, sure, those women have made that money themselves. People inherit money, too. But when there’s a male partner in the picture, it’s normal to be curious about who has the real earning power. We shouldn’t care, but how could a young woman on her own, struggling just to make rent, not wonder?

That’s the world Materialists takes place in, and Song sees what’s funny and what’s terrible about it at once—even as she acknowledges that it’s human to yearn for beautiful things, and for comfort. She’s chosen the perfect actors for this enterprise. Evans breathes both charm and originality into the character of the classic New York actor-cater-waiter. We may think of them as stereotypical, but they’re more just a fact of life. They’re a real thing, and they’re everywhere—Evans shrugs right into this character as if it were the rumpled shirt he threw on the floor last night. Pascal, as the tall, rich guy who keeps saying he just wants love, is adorable with just a hint of danger. On one of their early dates, at a sleek, obviously expensive restaurant, Harry brings Lucy a whole pot of flowers; it’s overkill, but he just can’t see it. He’s that kind of guy. Pascal captures his winsomeness, even as he forces you to ponder whether you’d really want to deal with that level of anxious-to-please attentiveness your whole life. Wouldn’t it become exhausting?

But Johnson is Song’s real not-so-secret weapon here. She’s a rarity among modern performers: there’s no desperation in her, no overt eagerness for likes. She’s both breezy and matter-of-fact. Lucy has come to loathe her job, but she’s good at it; she loves the guy with no dough, but she can’t help aspiring to the comfy brownstone life—who wants to live in a place with a cruddy kitchen, a leaky roof, and an unresponsive-landlord? Song, along with the character she and Johnson have shaped together, understands the weight of those questions, and she refuses to dismiss them outright. In that sense, Materialists is as far from rom-com territory as you can get. But in its understated, clear-eyed intelligence, it’s like Myrna Loy—the co-star, with William Powell, of the Thin Man comedies, among the most elegant and observant movies about marriage ever made—in movie form. This is a movie about question marks, not sure bets. And what is long-term, committed partnership but an ever-unfolding series of question marks, to which the answer is a sometimes-grudging, sometimes whole-hearted Yes? Materialists takes the risks seriously, without ever underselling the rewards.

https://time.com/7294007/materialists-review/